"No, thar never was much natur in me," responded Sarah, lifting her bombazine skirt with both hands as she stepped over a puddle. Her floating crape veil, bought ten years after her husband's death, with the money made from her turkeys, represented the single extravagance as well as the solitary ambition of her life. Even as a child she had longed ardently to wear crape, and this secret aspiration, which had smouldered in the early poverty-stricken years of her marriage, had burst suddenly into flame when she found herself a widow. During the burial service over her husband, while she had sat bowed in musty black cotton, which had been loaned her by a neighbour, she had vowed earnestly that she would wear weeds yet for Abner before she died. Ten years of scraping and saving were devoted to this sacred resolve, and now, twenty years after the death of Abner Revercomb, she was wearing a crape veil for him to his son's wedding. As she walked, so strong a smell of camphor floated from her garments, that old Adam sneezed twice, and then muttered hurriedly that "'twas the very season for chills." Something of her secret pride in her garb of mourning had entered into him while he limped beside her on his rheumatic old legs. Instead of stopping with the others for the wedding feast at the Solomon's cottage, Sarah pleaded a sudden palpitation of the heart, and hurried home to put the house in order before the arrival of the bride. Already she had prepared the best chamber and set the supper table with her blue and white china, but as she walked quietly home from church at the side of old Adam, she had remembered, with a sensation of panic, that she had forgotten to make up the the feather bed, which she rolled over for an airing. Not a speck of dust was left on the floor or windows, and a little later, while she began spreading the sheets, without waiting to remove her bonnet, she thought proudly that Judy probably never stayed in so entirely respectable a chamber in her life. Even the pitcher and basin were elaborately ornamented with peonies, the colour of the sampler in crewel work over the washstand; and on the bureau, between two crocheted mats of an intricate pattern, there was a pincushion in the shape of a monstrous tomato.